


Some Times The TARDIS Tried To Cheer Up The Doctor

by Dorkangel



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, The TARDIS's secondary POV (kind of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 19:15:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1358788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the Doctor sulks in Victorian London, the TARDIS reminisces on some of his companions.<br/>Bit dodgy plot, but I tried to write it from the TARDIS's mind.<br/>If you like this work, please leave kudos and comments :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Times The TARDIS Tried To Cheer Up The Doctor

**Author's Note:**

> If you don't know any of these characters... Look them up, or just ask me in the comments.  
> Clue: Kirsty McLaren appeared ONLY in the Highlanders.

Some Times the TARDIS (tried to) Look After the Doctor.

The Doctor's companions come and go.  
A lot.  
Some leave to help others, some fall in love, and some... some are forced to leave.

The TARDIS mourned for those that had no choice in the matter: she liked the Doctor's companions (mostly) and she missed the silly little humans (mostly) running around inside her, having adventures.  
More than that, the TARDIS hated it when the Doctor was unhappy. Also, when he started moping about and overusing the Randomiser and 'accidentally' leaning on the Personality Boosters, and telling her in tones more rude than necessary that she should really 'tidy up' - meaning, of course, get rid of the old bedrooms. She liked the old rooms, they meant something. Amy and Rory's room had bunkbeds. But then they'd decided they didn't like bunkbeds. She wasn't sure why. It was probably a biological thing.  
She knew what'd happened to Amy and Rory... sort of. She'd felt the temporal disturbance, and when the Doctor flew her away, they weren't with him.

And now he was moping around Victorian London with a Lizard, a Potato and an extremely athletic human girl, whom, unfortunately, he didn't seem to notice.  
The Lizard did though.

Amy and Rory's stuff was still hanging around, no matter how much the Doctor told her to clear up. It was good for him to face it, she thought.  
Rory had drunk an awful lot of tea when he was nervous, (pretty much all the time), so there was at least one infinitely shifting box of teabags in the kitchen. Amy had had quite a few cameras and magazines to keep herself occupied when Rory needed a lie down or the Doctor was chattering incessantly.  
The TARDIS had noticed the Doctor reading them once or twice.

One time, she remembered, Amy had been wandering along, looking at every third door - a lot of which were the swimming pool, as the TARDIS was easily bored - when she'd found a door that looked more than a little out of place. It was big and wooden and sturdy looking and generally crude. It appeared to have been made by a man with little woodwork skills to cover a hole in the wall.  
Amy had laughed at it at first, touched it gently, curiously, and slowly turned the handle.  
It was locked.  
"Oh come on!" she said, glancing up at the ceiling, and her Scottish voice had reminded the TARDIS of HIM so much that it'd simply swung open and Amy had stepped inside.

Now, when Jamie McCrimmon first joined the TARDIS, his room was fit for a prince. It was big and soft and, more than once, the TARDIS had caught him bouncing on the bed.  
But he'd grown homesick pretty quickly. Jamie loved the Doctor: the TARDIS could understand that, but he had missed 1700s Scotland a lot.  
And so, one day, Jamie had reached to open the door to his room and found it wasn't there, just a gap in the wall and a few planks on the floor. Never one to shirk from a challenge, Jamie had readily nailed them roughly into a door, and then opened it. To his surprise, on the other side was not his room, but a different one. Somehow it was more HIS room, though. He liked this new one better.

It was this room that Amy entered. It was quite small, with a curving roof, a roaring fireplace and a littler -though will very soft - bed. On the table there was a set of bagpipes and a book. She picked up the book gently: it was filled with scrawled writing, like that of a little child. Right at the start there was even a handwritten alphabet. 'James Robert McCrimmon' was printed neatly on the front, presumably by someone else.  
Suddenly aware that she was prying into this 'James Robert McCrimmon''s life, Amy put the book down and looked around one more time... and was supposed to see a great big speaker system in the corner of the room.

The TARDIS remembered when she had first installed the dock in Jamie's room and he had seen it and run off to Zoe, calling "Zoe, Doctor, help! There's a great metal beastie in my room, it's done something to my pipes!"  
"Jamie!" Zoe had laughed. "It's just some speakers."  
"What?"  
"They play music Jamie, see." She turned the iPod on, unsurprised as the sound of bagpipes blared out of it. The next track was 'Scotland the Brave', and the one after that was the Proclaimers.  
The TARDIS remembered that Jamie had always liked the Proclaimers. They were very, very Scottish and he thought that this was most defiantly a point in their favour.

Amy wandered over to the speakers, turning on the iPod. The TARDIS decided, on a whim, to explain, and a picture of Jamie in full kilt, holding a dirk and leaning on the Police Box exterior came up.  
"Oh." said Amy, lost for words. She pressed play and jumped as 'Scotland the Brave' rang out.  
The TARDIS had never ceased to be amazed by how much Amy understood. "He was homesick?" she had asked, looking up again, and the TARDIS had shuddered in affirmative reply.

Amy had almost forgotten about that encounter. She'd never mentioned it to the Doctor: the TARDIS thought to herself that Amelia Pond would never be that tactless.  
Rory Williams was though.

River had knocked her great big high heels accidentally against the TARDIS's personality boosters one day, and she'd decided to hide Rory's room as a result. She had also set off the sprinkler system once or twice on him.

"Oh, come on!" he had moaned, and ducked inside the nearest room. The TARDIS had chosen it randomly from all the rooms she kept for the Doctor to remember his friends by: it had belonged to a sailor named Ben.

Ben was miserable when the Doctor had first met him, upset that he had been left on a shore posting instead of travelling around on his ship, the HMS Teaser. To add even more joy to the fact that Ben now could not only travel the world, but all of Space and Time as well, she'd made it exactly like his bunk on the ship, only, well, bigger, so he could move around. After a while, the TARDIS had given him a double bed too, to make room for Polly every now and then.  
In a fit of childish rage, the ship had once painted Ben's walls with little cartoon boats and funny, pointy waves, but he had laughed so hard that she'd kept the decor. He was always good for a laugh, Ben Jackson.

He had been wearing his uniform when he had first arrived, and it was still there. Rory, practical man he was, had simply glanced at the name tag. "Ben Jackson." he had read. "Hmm."

Rory had come stumbling into the control room one morning (or whenever they woke up) and tapped the Doctor on the shoulder. "Doctor, who was Ben?" he had asked, and luckily for him, the Doctor was turned away, so Rory couldn't see his face grow that tiny bit sadder. "Ben used to travel with me, Rory. Him and me and his friend Polly. Girlfriend/Boyfriend, I think." The Doctor had forced himself to smile - the TARDIS could always tell the difference. "I can never tell." he finished, straightening his bowtie.  
The TARDIS had had to make the Doctor hot chocolate that morning.

And anyway, here he was, depressed and lonely in London in the 1800s, and she was BORED and WORRIED, and no amount of hot chocolate could fix it.  
So, one day, the TARDIS had taken flight all by herself (much to the Doctor's alarm) with him inside her, and she had landed in the middle of the twenty first century, on a satellite, and a tiny girl in an Alice-band had almost walked into her. "Doctor?" the girl had called, confused. "I thought you and Jamie had gone."  
After the TimeLords had wiped her mind, Zoe couldn't remember her adventures with the Doctor, and was so extremely surprised when a strange man in a scruffy top-hat had stuck his head out from his TARDIS.  
"Zoe!" he'd shouted automatically. "What are you doing here?"  
"I live here. This is the space wheel: who are you?"  
"Oh, I'm the Doctor. No time to explain."  
"What? No, the Doctor is a silly little man with strange trousers and a bowtie." The Doctor grinned, messing with his bowtie. "I'm his... brother. Zoe Heriot, would you like to have an adventure in my time machine?"

The Doctor had taken her back to Victorian London and they'd had a snowball fight. He didn't take her anywhere else though, the TARDIS could tell: to him it felt like cheating. He couldn't give her back her memories, or repeat all the things they'd done together. With Jamie too, James Robert McCrimmon. Jamie's memories, she'd reasoned, were quite another matter. He'd had MORE of them.  
The TARDIS could never resist a tiny little paradox. She jumped the Doctor back to the Eighteenth Century - rather than 1800s - to the scene of a bloody battle.  
He had leapt out of her, excited to see what he might find, not quite so miserable anymore, but stopped when he had seen the carnage. It was as if he had hit a brick wall. He just stopped.

The TARDIS felt bad even at the memory of it. The Doctor, her Thief, had turned around and glared at her. "You evil old cow." he had muttered, and he had meant it. "There's a reason all those Type 40s got destroyed. Daft old man, to steal a useless ship."

But then, to her surprise, he had started forward, bending to check the faces of the Scottish rebels who had died in the battle.  
He did not find Jamie among them.  
But, looking over the brow of a small hill, he did see some of the last remains of fighting between the rebels and the redcoats. This fight was not going particularly well for the Highlander in question, he could see that, but it was too far away for him to recognise the faces of the opponents.  
Luckily, the 1800s was a great time of invention, and the Doctor's coat pockets were bigger on the inside - technically 'Dimensionally Transcendent', but even the TARDIS didn't say that after 900 years of time travel with that man - and he was carrying a rather steampunk spyglass. He shot barely a glance through it and started running down the hill, skidding to a halt half way down when he remembered his fighting ability equaled that of an baby sloth, and tore his sonic screwdriver from his pocket. Gritting his teeth in foul anticipation of the noise, the TARDIS had watched as he flicked the little button and sent out a sonic squeal that would have deafened the two fighters if they'd been standing closer.  
Now, it was lucky the Doctor had intervened when he did, because the redcoat had had the Scotsman's knife to his own throat at that point.  
The Doctor ran forward, still sending out the immobilising noise, and knocked the redcoat on the head with his shoe. At last he stopped - it was putting even the TARDIS on edge - and the young Highlander scrambled to his feet.  
"Who are ye? One o' the Fair Folk?" he had cried, and the Doctor had recognised the boy immediately. This was defiantly Jamie.  
"Don't you recognise me?" he had laughed, knowing full well that poor Jamie wouldn't, even if the TimeLords hadn't wiped his mind. "I'm the Doctor!"  
"Och, don't be ridiculous. The Doctor was..." Jamie's face screwed up a little. He had had more adventures with the Doctor than anyone had ever had, before or after him, and the TimeLords had taken a huge chunk of his memory. It must have actually, physically HURT to try and think of the Doctor. "He was smaller." he said eventually. "But I thank ye for my life, sir. I'm Jamie, Jamie McCrimmon."  
"I know. I'm the Doctor."  
"No, yer not. He was different."  
"I've changed a bit."  
"Ye wouldn't be his son then? Or his brother?" Jamie guessed, clutching at straws. "Oh, never mind." said the Do Doctor, still laughing. "Come with me." And for some reason Jamie had trusted him, and he had come with him back to the TARDIS. "Aye, that's the Doctor's," he had said. "But his TARDIS was smaller. Or... bigger, somehow?"  
The Doctor smiled at the steady trickle of memories Jamie seemed to be regaining. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you." They headed into the TARDIS, Jamie no longer holding his knife up against the Doctor. "I am the same man, you know. Didn't Ben and Polly tell you about regeneration?"

The TARDIS had felt happier with Jamie back with the Doctor. So did the Doctor, for that matter, ad Jamie was delighted as his memories returned... But he could not leave Scotland for a second time, or Kirsty, whom he said had quite literally jumped ship to stay with him.

The TARDIS had found Jamie sitting in his room, playing a mournful tune on his pipes, clearly feeling somehow guilty. Sighing, he had turned over to the book that Victoria had given him to practice his writing and began to tell his story. He didn't quite know why.

TheTARDIS saw the writing and her circuits translated it, whether she wanted to or not.  
'Doctor, if you're reading this, I'm sorry. Anyone else, my name is Jamie McCrimmon, as you probably know. I was born 1727, and I am a Highland piper.  
The rest you already know, or can ask the Doctor about. After the TimeLords wiped my mind, I went back into the battle. I suppose the Doctor thinks he was only a few minutes. I was there for eight days.  
The Redcoats almost caught me once or twice, but luckily all that running with the Doctor has most definitely helped me out.   
There was one occasion where I thought I was properly done for, but King George's men had no such luck. For the second time then, my life was saved by a physician. He was an English medic by the name of Williams, Thomas Williams, I believe. He said that I was far too young for the hanging, and that he had a son my age. However, naturally when he stood aside to let me escape, I didn't run. I'm no coward. Poor Mr Williams had to 'accidentally' leave the key where I could reach it before I'd run off. I believe I cause him more trouble than I was worth, and my family owes his a debt. I won't forget that.  
I have killed, I think, but not deliberately. I've never hung around to see if they were truly dead or anything. I hope some of them got back up, though were at least injured enough not to try and take a shot at a Highlander again.  
I am writing this because I want to tell the Doctor. But maybe not to his face.  
Another thing, Doctor. When I thought you were dead, on the Space Station Thingy. The one I called twenty castles in the sky, I can not remember the name. You told me once that the TARDIS keeps you from ageing too quickly. I was there for two years, Doctor. Alone.'

The TARDIS remembered, sadly in her own way, that Jamie had put his pen down, unable to continue, and walked out of his room. He had gone to the control room, told the Doctor about Kirsty and going home, and he had left, promising as he did never to forget the Doctor again.

And the Doctor had lapsed back into his lonely sadness. And the TARDIS had tried again, one more time. She had landed outside a normal looking street somewhere in London, to where a stargazing old man was marching up a hill.

"Doctor!" he had shouted. "Doctor, you in there? Hahahaha, I knew you'd come back."  
The Doctor stuck his head out, and, seeing Wilfred Mott running towards him, tried to stick in back in again, but the TARDIS was having none of that. She kicked him out and waited for the old man with the red beanie to catch up with the Doctor. "Hey, you're not him," said Wilfred in confusion. "Where's the Doctor?"  
"I AM the Doctor!" laughed her Thief, putting on a brave face for silly old Wilfred Mott. "You remember I told you, my people change when they're dying? I changed."  
"You... you changed."  
Sensing the incredulity in Wilfred's voice, the Doctor looked him straight in the eye and told him: "Yes. Wilfred Mott, I first met you on Christmas Day and you told me that everyone else had run off."  
"Oh, yes! Doctor, of course." Wilfred chuckled. "What are you back here for?"  
"Well," he said. "For you, I think. The TARDIS brought me here, and I can't really talk to Donna. Is... is she alright?"  
"Very happy Doctor, a baby on the way too."  
"Really? Wow." The old Doctor wouldn't have smiled, but the new one did. He grinned, kind of sadly. The TARDIS knew that this one just hid his feelings better.  
The Doctor had, apparently, decided that enough was enough. He took Wilfred to the moon, extending the TARDIS's atmosphere bubble so they could have a picnic.  
They'd talked about Donna and spaceships and even about Gallifrey, which had generated high levels of surprise in the TARDIS's circuits. She'd barely ever heard him talking about their home, but he did then, telling the silly old man about the red grass and the glass citadel and the mountains and... Even of his childhood, playing with the boy who would become the Master on their father's estates in the mountains.  
The TARDIS remembered that too, flying over the mountains and landing in the city and flattening the red grass. She remembered the rubbish hats - not that the Doctor could talk - and the red robes and the circle writing that had always been so hard to read.

What most people didn't know about her Doctor was that his first reincarnation had had a tattoo with the Gallifreyan equivalent of 'Badass' written on his left buttock.  
What the Doctor didn't know was that Susan had had one too, only her's had said something worse.

She had taken Wilfred Mott back to his own time.  
And then the Doctor had stood in the control room and GLARED at her. "Are you done trying to cheer me up?" he had shouted. "Because I would appreciate it I you respected my privacy."  
A signal had flashed angrily up on the monitor that was Old High Gallifreyan for 'Well, forgive me for trying.', and it was followed by 'Go and sulk then.'. He had laughed, forgiving her. "I'm sorry, sexy. I just need time."  
The TARDIS had sighed in agreement and waited. Unfortunately, the next companion the Doctor picked up was far more annoying and rude than the TARDIS would have preferred, so she resolved to mess with the poor girl's head as often as possible.


End file.
